Plastic foam bodies or the like can be sliced into slabs by an apparatus comprising a cutting wire system having a plurality of substantially parallel cutting wires attached eccentrically to at least two parallel supporting rods, the rods being substantially perpendicular to the cutting wires and being spaced from each other with clearance so that the plastic foam solid can be passed therebetween. The ends of the supporting rods are rotatably pivotable in a rod frame, and an oscillating drive is associated with the supporting rods about their longitudinal axes.
In the apparatus of this type described in the U.S. Pat. No. 4,222,299 (see also U.S. Pat. No. 4,018,116), such wire arrays can be heated to rapidly slice up a foam body fed therepast by suitable conveying means.
In operation the cutting wires can be torn or broken by tension produced by coil springs resiliently mounting the ends of the cutting wires to the bars. Basically the possibility exists, of course, to change or remove the broken wires or the springs. However that requires significant time during which the apparatus cannot work. For shortening this down-time the known apparatus is designed to enable changing all of the cutting wires at once.
For this purpose the cutting wires are attached to the supporting rods by a detachable support strip.
For changing the totality of the cutting wires therefore the support strips together with the cutting wires are removed from the supporting rods, and another pair of support strips with unbroken cutting wires attached is mounted upon the support bars. These actions require persons working high speed, because the cutting wires have a comparatively large clearance from one another and the support strip is constructed without a rigid structural member.